'Might Have Been' - Flash Hiders
[“Might Have Been” is a bi-weekly column by Todd Ciolek that explores the ways in which promising games, characters, and concepts failed. This week’s edition looks at Right Stuff's Flash Hiders and Battle Tycoon, released for the PC Engine in 1993 and the Super Famicom in 1995, respectively.]
Many will snort derisively at the idea of fighting games having storylines. The fighter, they will tell you, has always been about competition, about facing another human in matches free of plot or computer-controlled opponents. And they’re right. Modern fighters typically offer some story mode or a similar one-player attraction, but they’ve never really needed them. In fact, the first genre offerings to follow Street Fighter II’s 1991 debut had no real narratives. Fighting games had characters, and, if you were lucky, endings. That was all.
It wasn’t until 1993 that a developer called Right Stuff bothered to change things. They’d made a name by dealing in PC Engine games like Emerald Dragon, Fang of Alnam, and other RPGs heavy on cinematic cutscenes and anime archetypes. Why then, someone at Right Stuff surely asked, couldn’t a fighting game have the same focus? And so Flash Hiders emerged.
Unhidden flash
Much like the typical CD-based RPG of its day, Flash Hiders begins with a lengthy animated intro, one that finds an easily annoyed martial artist named Bang Bipot and a temperamental sorceress named Tiria Rossette on a trek across a half-medieval, half-futuristic world. In the game’s main “Scenario” mode, the not-quite-a-couple runs across and all but adopts Erue, an emotionally fragile young man somehow connected to an assortment of thugs, bounty hunters, and stranger things.
As a manga-style yarn that haphazardly meshes fantasy and science fiction tropes, Flash Hiders’ story isn’t particularly remarkable. It doesn’t help that the presentation’s uneven: some sequences are just talking heads or static images without even some two-frame lip flap thrown in for dramatic illusion’s sake. And while there’s a bit of comic timing in the characters’ constant bickering, it’s rarely imaginative. An example: the first scripted fight results after Harman, a curvaceous and vain female mercenary, angrily kicks over a restaurant table when Erue calls her “Oba-san” (“Grandma”), leaving Bang to avenge his ruined meal. If you’ve seen any given sword-and-sorcery anime comedy, you’ve seen Flash Hiders.
Leveling up
Yet in 1993, it was revolutionary for a fighter to develop any story at all, and Flash Hiders borrowed more than cutscenes from Right Stuff’s RPG experience. Before each match, characters can buy and equip different items, and then selectively boost their defense, attack power, and speed. Simple as this may be, the selective stat raises add a lot to the fighting template, and actually allow far more freedom of character development than the typical 16-bit Japanese RPG.
Though the Scenario storyline restricts players to controlling Bang, the “Advance” mode takes the rest of the main characters down their own goofy plot threads. In testament to Right Stuff's target audience, both modes automatically have your chosen character controlled by AI; you’ve got to fiddle with the options before the game lets you play instead of watch.
And watching isn’t all that fun. The animated intermissions may be colorful (and a bit too glossy), but the battles have a washed-out look, with limited animation and muted palettes. Still, the soundtrack isn’t bad, and Right Stuff spent considerable sums on a voice cast that includes then-famous anime actors like Kumiko Watanabe, Konami Yoshida, and the revered Megumi Hayashibara, who could practically sell a game on her own back in 1993.
Simple depths
And beneath all of the shiny, huge-eyed vixens and shrill battle cries, there’s a surprisingly detailed fighting game. The controls are precise, and the cast of characters is quite balanced for a fighter that was never designed for fierce competition. There's a intriguing mix in the three classes of fighter: the magicians specialize in projectiles, the cyborgs are slow and powerful, and the remaining warriors, as members of some "were" race, morph into wolves, tigers, and other predators during their special moves.
The combatants even use dashes and guard canceling, now-standard techniques that were strikingly uncommon in the time of Mortal Kombat. Perhaps that's why Flash Hiders, unlike many fighters of its era, doesn’t feel wholly outdated when matched against the current complexities of Guilty Gear X2 #Reload or Street Fighter III: Third Strike.
In the mid-‘90s, however, Flash Hiders didn’t quite catch on. Every popular fighting game of the era started in the arcades, and a PC Engine CD release didn’t command the same attention, not when the PCE’s stock two-button controller simplified Flash Hiders’ four-button mechanics. The game never even showed in the West. The U.S. TurboDuo was one-tenth as successful as its Japanese incarnation, and if NEC couldn’t be bothered to release Street Fighter II on their American system, they couldn’t be bothered with Flash Hiders.
Flash Hiders EX Plus Lesbian
Right Stuff took another chance on its fighting venture in 1995, with Battle Tycoon: Flash Hiders SFX for the Super Famicom. The alleged sequel loses the original’s Scenario mode and all of its cinematic sequences, though the in-game fighters at least animate better. The Advance mode, meanwhile, is substantially improved in Battle Tycoon, in which players can roam freely from one city location to another, picking fights, upgrading characters, and even visiting a coliseum to bet on all-AI showdowns.
Battle Tycoon also lost four of Flash Hiders’ duller fighters, replacing them with the cyborg Guston Slade, Bang’s father Jail Lance, and a swordswoman named Patchet Vayne. Perhaps Battle Tycoon’s only real point of invention, Patchet stands as one of the fighting genre’s first lesbian and/or bisexual characters. (Or the first at all, if one ignores Variable Geo, and one should.) Naturally, Patchet’s also a complete stereotype: muscular, hedonistic, and not particularly bright, she spends most of her Advance-mode story lusting after the other female fighters. One of her moves makes her resemble a metal-skinned wolf, but I doubt that’s tied to her sexual proclivities.
Right but largely irrelevant stuff
Battle Tycoon made even fewer waves that Flash Hiders did, and for the same reasons: it wasn’t an arcade game, the market in 1995 was already saturated with fighters that were, and no one cared to translate a dated-looking fighter for North America.
Right Stuff gave up on the would-be franchise soon after, turning instead to a doomed sequel to their Alnam RPG. The company didn’t survive the decade, and their demise killed chances for a world where Flash Hiders eventually would be a hit, a world where fans would hold tournaments in its name and the lonelier devotees would buy suggestively posed statues depicting Harman and Patchet instead of Cammy and Mai Shiranui.
Yet if Flash Hiders didn't get far, its ideas did. Modern fighters such as Soul Calibur have elaborate weapon-upgrading system, while the likes of Guilty Gear, Melty Blood, and Tech Romancer have engaging story modes. It’s not clear if Namco, Capcom, and other developers were inspired by Flash Hiders or if they merely followed a natural evolutionary path, but even if Right Stuff’s little experiment had no far-reaching influence, its spirit lives on in any fighter that’s fun to play solo.
And, of course, any game with a metallic lesbian werewolf.
[Todd Ciolek is a magazine editor in New York City.]
Comments
I guess the fact that I don't consider the human-vs-human aspect of a fighting game a primary element is further proof that the world is wrong, and I'm the only one that knows what's what. Seriously though, is that what people think? The goal of Street Fighter for me was always to kick M. Bison's ass, and I never appreciated when some 9-year-old snot put his quarter in the machine and interrupted my game, little bastard. Real accomplishment came from beating Geese Howard, or Amakusa (that's STILL quite elusive) not my friend. Human competition is good for practice, to learn skills to be used during the “main quest.”
The bottom line, and this is a belief I've held for all my gaming life, is that story is a primary reason for a games existence. Without story, what's the damn point? I'm constantly horrified to learn that this is not a gospel truth in the industry.
Posted by: lech | May 11, 2007 9:13 AM
In response to the last comment... FUN is the primary reason for a game's existence. If someone enjoys the challenge and excitement of knowing he's better than his friends more than the challenge and excitement of knowing he's better than the AI routine programmers at Capcom, why should someone else come along and tell him that his route is less 'legitimate'?
I used to always resent the people who would get on a DDR machine, pick the easiest setting, and then showboat (instead of playing a legitimately difficult song). But then I met a friend whose 'stategy' in PaRappa The Rapper was to hit the L button as frequently as often because it's worth the most points.. and in that mishmash of horrible-sounding-but-computer-rewarded virtual rapping, I saw what an ass I looked like for resenting people who wanted to have fun when they played a game. ;P
That got a little off-topic from the subject matter of the article though, I guess! Sorry.
Posted by: RavenWorks | May 11, 2007 10:23 AM
The problem of the human-vs-CPU aspect of fighters is that while it starts as a fighter where you try to learn to best use your chosen character, such games tend to become more of a puzzle game where you look for what flaws in the AI you can exploit for victory. This is particularly so for games where the deck is heavily stacked against the player on later fights, or where the AI is particularly robotic.
I'm not saying people cannot find enjoyment beating the CPU, but rather that it tends to be a completely different experience. For a fan of fighters, it can be somewhat worse, as experience in other fighters tends to give a heavy advantage in tripping across exploitable situations in a new fighter, which can kill all enjoyment for some people.
Posted by: Baines | May 11, 2007 5:12 PM
The problem with computer opponents in fighting games is that they're just arbitrary.
If the game is well-designed there's a way out of any situation, and the computer player both knows what it is and has perfect reflexes to pull it off. Thus, a computer player can be arbitrarily good.
If fighting games were really complex then at least the player could strategize and try to overcome the computer's advantage that way, but there aren't enough meaningful variables to optimize.
Posted by: John H. | May 11, 2007 7:02 PM
With fighting games, the problem with computer opponents is that they are not human, and only try to mimick human-style play in the most superficial ways, if at all.
With a way out of every situation and the reflexes to execute it, you might get a "perfect" opponent, but not many would likely consider it a "good" one.
Posted by: Baines | May 11, 2007 8:35 PM
Well there you have it. You all just illustrated my point. The CPU controlled opponents of a 1-on-1 fighter are always useless as real competition, which makes the presence of a strong narrative that much more important. If I don't have a good reason to pound on this guy, than why should I pay for this experience? (Whether it's a quarter in the arcade, or $50 at retail.)
And in reference to RavenWorks' comment, the fun comes from accomplishing the mission. Simply standing there and pushing buttons until the other guy falls is not fun. Playing through the role of a character in a story arc (ie: the son of a murdered martial artist) is where the fun is. Other wise, the game is as much fun as me sitting here typing.
Posted by: lech | May 12, 2007 8:53 AM